Background
Frank Egler was born on the 26th of April 1911 in New York City, growing up on Manhattan’s West Side.
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1965
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1968
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1970
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1977
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1983
Frank Egler was born on the 26th of April 1911 in New York City, growing up on Manhattan’s West Side.
He went on to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse, to pursue a career in landscape engineering, but switched to plant ecology and the University of Chicago, graduating in 1932. At Chicago, he was a student in the last course taught by Henry C. Cowles. Egler obtained his Master of Science in plant ecology from the University of Minnesota in 1934, and his Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University in 1936.
At Minnesota, he studied with William Skinner Cooper, joining one of the most remarkable cohorts of students ever assembled under one professor. It included Rexford F. Daubenmire, Murray Fife Buell, and Henry J. Oosting. Egler had intended to continue under Cooper for his Doctor of Philosophy, but switched to George E. Nichols and Yale, after Nichols offered him a fellowship to study the vegetation around the Egler summer home in northern Connecticut. Egler had already embarked on its study for his dissertation when Nichols made the offer.
Although soured on academics by his experience at Syracuse Forestry, Egler missed having students. He taught occasionally in colleges and universities. When he began his experiments with herbicides, he realized that he needed the prestige that an academic position had once given him.
From 1951-1955, he was a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Egler was a prolific writer and a prescient scientist. His 1942 paper, “Vegetation as an Object of Study,” was among the first to attempt to apply the logic of philosophy to ecology. The same year, and more than a decade before Charles Elton’s influential 1958 book on the subject, he published on invasion ecology.
His study of Hawaiian vegetation is one of three papers credited with helping to finally bring down the Clementsian paradigm that so dominated American ecology to that time.
In his later years, Egler used book reviews in Ecology to keep scientists and publishers on their toes, giving praise only when it was due. In his own books, he tried to develop an appreciation for good science in the layperson. Some of his works were written under the anagrammatic pseudonyms of Warren G. Kenfield (Frank Edwin Egler) and Stan R. Foote (Aton Forest).
Throughout his career, Egler was active in conservation work. He was a charter member of the Ecologists’ Union and on the Board of Governors when it became The Nature Conservancy. An interesting aside is that the Nature Conservancy may well have become the world’s most successful environmental organization because Egler was forced out of his Museum position.
